I’m beginning to feel like a maid, given all the tidying up I’ve been doing here lately. Little corrections here and there, never welcome, though I know from experience that no one is immune to error, especially under deadline pressure.
Anyway, for the record, Weymouth is not in Essex County, which I knew when I wrote it in black and white right here last week. Weymouth is in fact a Norfolk County town situated just above the old northern border of Plymouth Colony, which oversaw the original Wessagusset settlement bankrolled by Thomas Weston in 1622.
But, enough of the annoying housecleaning. Onto something else. That is, the old topic of King Philip’s War, which wreaked havoc on our Connecticut Valley from August 1675 through May 1676, and was the subject of a talk at Deerfield Academy’s Garonzik Auditorium on April 28. The place wasn’t full, but not far off, either, with perhaps 200 in attendance. I would guess audience members had an average age of 65, which is a little troubling. It would be nice to see the topic drawing a younger crowd. Of course, that’s the same criticism I have about most Nolumbeka Project events, whose crowds trend toward senior.
“Conflict, Resistance, and Legacies: Revisiting King Philip’s War” brought quite a mix on a panel of four. Moderator Kevin Sweeney, Amherst College professor emeritus of American studies and history, introduced learned Smith College historian Neal Salisbury to kick off the discussion. Also in the stable of scholarly speakers were two relative newcomers to the scene, college professors and authors Lisa Brooks of Amherst College and Christine DeLucia of Mount Holyoke College, soon to be Williams College.
The two-plus-hour symposium flowed well and was informative, followed by a social, meet and greet, and book signing that went well. Franklin County is fortunate to have two well heeled schools available as host for such events, the other being adjacent Eaglebrook School, which accommodated an excellent archaeological program a couple of years ago.
Saturday’s symposium likely triggered different internal curiosities among audience members. Myself, the discussion brought me back to my boyhood, when I learned to skate and fish, and catch frogs and turtles on Bloody Brook. Those were also the days when we often climbed the steep Native American trail up North Sugarloaf’s sunny west face and less frequently the trodden path up Mount Sugarloaf’s southern face to hidden shelf-caves.
Which reminds me, it’s funny how times change from generation to generation. Just Monday, I read the late Tom Merrigan’s 2012 memoir “Sugarloaf Street,” about growing up in South Deerfield. In it, he mentions climbing Mount Sugarloaf and throwing caution to the wind on the tributary footpath leading to that shelf-cave cresting a high, dangerous cliff. We, too, knew it was a perilous path for anyone stupid enough to approach it haphazardly. We didn’t, and I don’t remember being frightened. No, just focused on getting there to sit peacefully undetected under the feet of chatty tourists viewing the Connecticut Valley scenery. It was like sitting simultaneously in a time capsule and secret hideout, the tourists above.
Frankly, we always preferred the North Sugarloaf cave, where adults were rare. Honestly, I can’t recall ever encountering an adult up there. We’d just sit in total, wild privacy, viewing stunning scenery to the south and west, fantasizing, even identifying some of the cars passing below on the small-town streets of South Deerfield. It was a magical setting for a young boy. Even now, the site’s historical aura and allure endures. People have sat in that secluded seat for thousands of years and it’s palpable. You can feel it in the spiritual, sense-of-place realm.
Something Merrigan recounted from his South Deerfield upbringing was a horrifying tale of King Philip throwing colonial prisoners off the Mount Sugarloaf cliffs. That, I had never before heard, yet I am familiar with the old Parker family tale of a witch jumping from the top of Mount Sugarloaf to a giant oak tree on my sixth-great-grandfather, Joseph Sanderson’s, front yard along the west side of River Road.
That tree and the old Sanderson homestead are long gone, but the tale survives in Josiah Howard Temple’s “Early Ecclesiastical History of Whately.” Who knows where it originated? Native American myth? Colonial? A fanciful blend of the two? That question will likely never be answered. Sadly, it’s too far removed from the Pioneer Valley narrative, given the Native diaspora to faraway places so long ago. With the displacement of the Native peoples went their stories of the land, which lose their physical attachment when the people telling or listening to them have no visual connection. Myself, I grew up looking at the Sugarloafs every day and could immediately identify them from afar.
As a young teen, my family moved to North Main Street from the Pleasant Street Sanderson homestead I sold in 1997 to move to Greenfield. The ground for that building was broken in the late 18th century by French and Indian War veteran William Anderson. I awoke each morning looking through my rock-maple bed’s footposts at the Bloody Brook Monument spire.
So, let’s just say Bloody Brook and King Philip’s War were in my blood and soul, whether or not I knew it then. Thus, my later interest in that period of local history we learned little or nothing about in school. Honestly, we touched upon Custer’s Last Stand and maybe even Pocahontas and John Smith in school, but not a word about the Swamp Fight or Bloody Brook or Beers Plain, despite the fact that some students could probably drawn genealogical links to the English combatants and casualties.
Tell me how that happens in classrooms through whose windows the Bloody Brook Monument was visible? It makes no sense. Talk about out of touch with local history.
Still, even with the many scholarly King Philip’s War books recently written, I find myself complaining about the same paucity of information for the Connecticut Valley campaign that began with the Swamp Fight at the foot of Sugarloaf and went on to Beers Plain, Bloody Brook and the Falls Fight. Perhaps this new research brought by a grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program will finally unravel the confusing narrative that is complicated by the colonial Christian lens that’s been accepted for nearly four centuries. Yes, it’s true that to the victors go the spoils, and the right to tell the story, but there is another side to the story, which was delivered Saturday in Old Deerfield.
Hopefully, this new narrative will be expanded upon, the minute details pinned down by a new round of academic discovery. The project is long overdue — this coming from a man who’s read about everything there is to read about the 17th-century conflict and is tired of coming away begging for additional insight into the Connecticut Valley campaign. There seems to be much more recorded about what happened in southeastern Massachusetts, where it all began, than here is the Pioneer Valley, where it intensified.
So, maybe the experts will finally do justice to King Philip’s War in our Pioneer Valley, the place where the tide turned in the colonials’ favor, scattering the indigenous people who called it home in all directions, thus robbing us of their deep stories of the land. The stories that have survived came from captive Mary Rowlandson and Puritan ministers Increase Mather and William Hubbard, all of whom were about as familiar with the Connecticut Valley landscape and its indigenous people as they would have been if captured by a spaceship and jettisoned off to Mars.
We can, and must, do better.